Don't make me frog it. You won't like me when I frog it.

Bucket full of eggs, the Frankenflower, vintage fabric and February’s finished socks.

It’s been another week of organising and sorting through my crafty bits and pieces, labouring under the illusion that if there’s some kind of system I must still be in control. (There isn’t. I’m not.) Still, I should count myself lucky that I’ve managed to accumulate some fantastic resources, along with a very supportive husband who trusts me to make something from all this stuff! He really does deserve a medal of some sort. Yesterday he drove me an hour up the coast to go beach combing for driftwood. We stamped around for an hour getting our faces sandblasted in gale force winds, and he helped me carry loads of it back to his nice clean car! It’s all drying out by the radiators, so I’ll post pics when it’s not so sad and soggy!

With Easter and another craft fair coming up, I’ve started making crochet eggs. Trawling round town, trying to get polystyrene eggs for a decent price is a story too boring to tell. Short version: Hobbycraft overcharges by A LOT! (and yet I still bought some there -WHY?) I did start out with a pattern from an old issue of Simply Crochet but my eggs were too big, so I very quickly went off in my own direction, which was a lot more fun!

I love this bucket.

I found the little purple bucket in that picture for 85p in a charity shop, and I hooked up its little jumper last night. I absolutely love it, but it will go on the stall so I only get to keep it if it doesn’t sell. 😦

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about starting to spring clean and reorganise my stash of craft supplies. My bed is now floating comfortably atop the mountain of yarn I managed to stuff into zip up laundry bags, and my wardrobe is full to about waist deep with fabric of various kinds. There was more than a little swearing and brute force involved in getting it there. In comparison dealing with my collection of fat quarters was practically a spiritual experience as I ironed and folded away each precious scrap with Zen-like calm and… okay, I confess that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I hate ironing, but I did at least from this:

to this:

with minimal damage to me, the iron, the ironing board, and most importantly, the fabric.

I bought most of my fat quarters when I got into doing patchwork last summer. At some point I should do a post about my patchwork cushions, although they often put in a sneaky appearance in the background of my photos anyway! Anything smaller than a fat quarter tends to end up in my rag bag, which is a bit of a crochet monster!

This crochet beast was made up from odds and ends of scrap yarn. (Note the patchwork cushion sneaking into the frame!)

I pretty much save every bit of fabric larger than a postage stamp, and all those scraps came in handy when I got my Clover Kanzashi Flower Maker last week. At first I was horrified at first at the idea of paying a fiver for a gadget that is essentially just a bit of plastic that folds in half, especially when you can make the flowers without one. One of my crafty friends makes beautiful little blossoms without a gadget, and a part of me felt that using one would somehow be cheating. But then I remembered the pompom maker. Yes, you can make pompoms without a pompom maker but it’s boring and takes ages. On the other hand, with one you can make LOADS AND LOADS AND LOADS AND IT’S AWESOME!

So I bought the flower maker.

My first attempt was a bit of a Frankenflower, and I almost lost faith in my over-priced piece of plastic, but with a bit of practice (and re-reading the instructions) something just clicked!

The Frankenflower next to a much prettier specimen!

and over a couple of days this happened!

Oodles of beautiful fabric flowers!

I still think using the gadget is cheating really, but that didn’t stop me buying the larger version too! I have so many things I want to decorate with them! Traditionally this style of fabric flower was used to make decorations to be worn in ladies’ hair, but as my friend Emma already has that covered with her handmade flowers, I think I’ll go in another direction with mine. Watch this space.

I’d have to make an awful lot of fabric flowers to make a serious dent on my stash of fabric, especially when I keep adding to it. There was, however, a fantastic find in my local Salvation Army shop that was just too good to ignore.

Vintage 1970s bed linen!

That, my friends, is a pile of fabric consisting of: four pillow cases priced at 50p each, and three matching double sheets priced at £3 each, and the colours are still beautifully bright! This haul only cost me £11! There are so many things I want to make with this fabric, and there’s so much of it that I’ll be able to make them all!

No picture of my stripey blanket this week, so you will just have to be twice as impressed next time! And just to confuse things, I’ve started a Granny Stripe Blanket inspired by Attic24‘s beautiful (and now iconic!) one. That brings the number of blankets I’m working on at the moment to a total of four. I really should finish one or two before I start any more…

I have at least finished my second pair of socks this year! They don’t look like much sat on my sofa.

I love the randomness of this self-striping yarn.

But with my feet in them and some moody lighting…

Wow, my feet almost look attractive in these!

…they don’t look too shabby!

I’ve got the hang of the heel now so I think it could be time too take a deep breath and break out the 4ply. Wish me luck!

Thank you! And good luck with the socks! Don’t lose heart if you don’t get on with the first pattern you try. There are a lot of different methods you can use, and youtube is an amazing resource to turn to if you get stuck. Let me know how you get on. 🙂

But that’s only my stash of fat quarters! All my larger pieces of fabric are stuffed into a giant laundry bag at the bottom of my wardrobe! Plus I’m still finding the odd FQ that didn’t get put neatly away. I still get points for effort , right? 🙂